That day

 Eighty years now since it all ended, and again I'm in Della Nichter's living room on the south side of Fort Wayne, listening to her story. Again she's showing me a tattered piece of flimsy lovingly sheathed in plastic, 32 terrible words partly obscured by faded pink splotches.

The tattered piece of flimsy is a telegram. 

The faded pink splotches are Della's lipstick, decades old now.

The 32 words under the splotches begin this way: The Secretary of War asked me to express his deep regret ...

That's how Della Nichter found out her then-husband, a P-38 pilot with the 14th Air Force named Robert M. Bentz, had been killed in action in China on July 27, 1945.

The serviceman bearing the telegram arrived on Della Nichter's doorstep on August 13, 1945, about 7:30 in the evening.

The next day, Japan formerly surrendered, ending the most destructive war in human history. By 7:30 in the evening on the 13th, though, word had already gotten out, and outside the city was losing its mind, everyone dancing in the streets and laughing and  who knows what all.

The war they called Big Two was over. But on Della Nichter's doorstep, it had only just come home.

She was 21 years old with a 2-year-old daughter and an infant son she wasn't even sure her husband knew about, and now he was gone and she was a widow with a truckload of grief to carry around. She was hardly alone in that, of course. In America and Europe and Asia and, well, everywhere, really, there were millions bearing that same truckload of grief, mourning the millions more whose lives had vanished without a trace.

War is hell and you can't refine it, that man of war William Tecumseh Sherman once said. It is death and ruin and more death and yet more death, so much death it seems all the graveyards on earth cannot hold it. It is filth and stench and every vileness human beings are capable of when they're compelled to stop behaving like human beings.

And, yes: It is also victory. Peace, temporary though it may be. The crushing of tyranny, temporary though that may be. 

But if it's important to commemorate all that on this 80th anniversary of V-J Day, it's also important to remember how it was bought. It's important to remember a young mother in the Midwest feeling the price of victory, the sacrifice it demands, even as the celebrations went on.

"It was like I turned to ice," Della Nichter recalled, when I visited her 30 years ago. It had been half-a-century then since those 32 words arrived, but she remembered every detail, could see it all as if it was happening even as we spoke.

Taking the telegram from the serviceman. Watching him almost flee her front step. Walking into the dining room, laying the telegram carefully on the table, saying to herself, You know, when I open that telegram, I won't have Bob anymore.

And so she didn't. 

And so in time the truckload of grief would ease, and soften into the ache of memory. Della's children would grow, and she would meet a World War II  vet named Eugene Nichter, and they would share a long life together. And if V-J Day would always mean something different to her than to everyone else, there was a small victory to be had even for her.

From the piece I wrote 30 years for the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette:

A few years after the war, she met an Okinawa veteran named Eugene Nichter, and they have been happily married since. And just a few years ago, her son, Bob, the one she was nursing that long-ago August evening, contacted his father's old flight leader, who told him Robert Bentz had known about young Bob after all.

So, yes, there is a happy ending for sorts, to the 13 Aug. 1945 of Della Nichter. There is indeed. 

It comes by way of a message delivered to to 2/Lt. Bentz Robt. M., as he sat on the flight line in Kunming, China, on the last day of his life. It comes in the vision of Robert Bentz standing bolt upright in his cockpit and tossing his hat, and then screaming for joy at the Chinese sky:

"It's a boy!"